Environmental Impacts

One Change Can Affect Many Systems

When we talk about climate change, we usually focus on air temperatures. However, 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases since the 1950s is stored in the oceans ( IPCC, 2019; Dahlman and Lindsey, 2020).

Many impacts caused by changes in climate can co-vary, one physical or biological change can cause changes in other systems in difficult-to-predict  ways. For example, the increased heat content of our estuarine and ocean waters has effects within all of the categories below and more.

The geophysical sciences that underlie changes in our climate are complex but well-explained in resources such as the Fourth National Climate Assessment (USGCRP, 2018), NOAA (2020), and NASA (2020). Please see these and the citations below and on other pages for decades of additional findings, primarily from the growing geophysics and biology literatures.